The art of Michele Guido and the geometries of nature

First name and surname: Michele Guido

Place and year of birth: Aradeo (LE), 1976

Related galleries and social media links: https://www.liarumma.it/artisti/michele-guido, https://www.z2ogalleria.it/artists/37-michele-guido/works/

Instagram: @micheleguido_

How I organise my day can vary depending on many factors. When I’m doing research, I visit libraries and botanical gardens, meet farmers and explore ‘abandoned’ countryside in search of new perspectives, particularly in those areas that Gilles Clément refers to as ‘residual’. These spaces can also be encountered whilst walking or cycling around the city. Over the years, I have built up an archive that I might also describe as ‘urban’, consisting of various plant materials. I use these to create my works and develop my research, which can sometimes stem from as little as a twig that has shared its existence with an insect to create plant-based structures. I read texts and attend lectures on plants, philosophy, anthropology, etc. I visit many exhibitions.

When working on a project, he spends days in front of the computer. When production is required, he often collaborates with Paolo Romano in the post-production studios: they have known each other since their days at Brera, and all photographs printed using the Lambda process – and others besides – have been post-produced with him. He also works in the very few remaining darkroom laboratories in Milan; at the ARTE3 studio with Paola Serighelli, if the work is printed using screen-printing techniques – they have been collaborating since 2011, when her father Alberto used to handle the squeegees; or in Ivana Antonini’s workshop in Montelupo Fiorentino, if he needs to create something in ceramics. We met in 2017, thanks to a residency organised by Matteo Zauli, and so on: it always depends on the type of work. I have also collaborated with scientists on the development of certain projects. If I have to install an exhibition, I can be anywhere, even in a wood. There is also the ‘structured’ part of the day, dedicated to teaching, which I have been doing since 2008: first at Brera, where I also studied, and for almost five years now in Florence.

It is a branching out of many forms of knowledge that have their roots in the work itself. Every time the work changes, the root changes and, consequently, so do the possible branches. I have no assistants: there is no one in the studio, by personal choice. Collaborating with craftspeople who work in their own studios means that their craft develops in response to the needs of many artists, rather than those of a single one. This creates a genuine rhizomatic system, linked to the distribution of knowledge, including across different disciplines.

On the occasion of my solo exhibition at Sara Zanin’s Z2O gallery, Gabriele Girolamini wrote that architects have accustomed us to seeing a building as if it were a plant, whilst the artist can make us observe a plant as if it were a building. A tree or a small wild plant, from this perspective, embodies architecture in every sense of the word, capable of teaching lessons across disciplines, beginning with geometry: were it not so, they would not stand upright and could not fulfil their functions. The Fibonacci sequence recurs in the arrangement of leaves and other parts of plants. The sequence was introduced to Europe by Leonardo Pisano in 1202, but its connection with plant geometry was studied and described mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, and it was not until 1977 that the first major studies on the mechanisms of phyllotaxis were published.

When cut open, some cacti reveal internal structures resembling pentagons or hexagons. Cycads, ancient plants that can still be admired today in various botanical gardens, including those in Florence, Naples and Palermo, produce large cones with a spiral structure that look as though they were created using a 3D printer. These shapes already existed millions of years ago. These examples are truly astonishing. One characteristic of the plant kingdom is its ability to regenerate: some plants can regrow from small cut or damaged parts. Roots can even sprout from a leaf. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, is not divisible in the same way: if we lose an arm, for example, another one does not grow back. Once we have identified the module, the geometry and the architecture, we have the tools to think of the design of a garden or forest as a system capable of fostering processes of spontaneous plant growth.

It was crucial. The agriculture I was used to as a child was intensive: tobacco and olive trees stretched across the whole of Salento, with biodiversity reduced to a bare minimum. With the end of state control over tobacco cultivation and the arrival of Xylella fastidiosa, the two main crops have disappeared. On the one hand, the economy has suffered greatly; on the other, on the ‘abandoned’ land – particularly following the withering of the olive trees – what I call the ‘botanical archaeology of the contemporary’ has been reborn. A range of plants, previously eliminated by pesticides or the selection of very few species, has begun to grow once more. These areas, which are often regarded as abandoned places, represent for me a contemporary vision of the landscape: territories where biodiversity is extremely rich and where there exists an ecology of living things to which we have not yet been educated. Abandonment exists only in the eye of the beholder: the space is always there; it is up to those who study it to identify its potential and imagine the future it may hold.

I do not usually focus on a single project until it is completed: I carry out several research projects simultaneously. In the coming days, a permanent project for Gibellina, the 2026 Italian Capital of Contemporary Art, will be unveiled. It was commissioned by the Merz Foundation, in collaboration with the MeNO Foundation, and marks the occasion of BAM – the Mediterranean Archipelago Biennale. The project involves the creation of a woodland and vegetable gardens, which will take root once an urban area has been de-paved: an attempt to restore biodiversity to the soil that has remained hidden beneath the paving for many years. It is the realisation of a project conceived ten years ago that is finally finding its place in a specific location. Next spring, a new site-specific work, curated by Lorenzo Madaro, is due to be installed on the façade of the Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS Foundation, to mark Millenium 2027, an international cultural event dedicated to the history and legacy of the Normans. In the studio, too, there is always more work in the pipeline – some of which settles for a while, whilst other parts are brought to the fore to gauge whether the time is right to give them shape.

Over the years, a very dense network of references has built up. If I had to identify a fundamental one, it would certainly be linked to the process of marking out furrows in the fields to plant seedlings: a veritable ‘geometric design’. Thanks to an uncle’s photography studio, I had the opportunity to discover the medium of photography, which, together with drawing, forms a predominant part of my work – understood precisely as a luminous process that relates to the photosynthesis of leaves. The transformation of all this into a genuine artistic consciousness is due to a number of key figures. Firstly, Eliseo Mattiacci and Hidetoshi Nagasawa, whom I had met at the TAM Centre; then, at Brera, with Luciano Fabro and Alberto Garutti, I attended their lectures even though I wasn’t enrolled on their courses. It was an era when we were pursuing culture, not credits. After my studies, my long-standing relationship with Lia Rumma also taught me how to use space when installing works.

The theoretical aspect is not separate from the visual one, as the two dimensions are often intertwined. The person who taught me to observe plants from an architectural and scientific perspective was undoubtedly Jole de Sanna. Together with her and Nagasawa, I explored in greater depth the Japanese concept of MA (間) – which denotes an interval, a pause, a distance or a relational space-time – which I had already presented in my thesis at Brera. From this reflection emerged the first sections of the Victoria stems and those of the Liquidambar, in 2003. In recent years, Maria Giovanna Mancini’s publications on landscape have also served as a theoretical reference for my work. These readings gave rise to a number of reflections on the woodland as a public and relational space, a theme also discussed within the context of the Giardino Project, curated by Giuseppe Arnesano.

Another point for consideration relates to the exhibition "In-Sectum. Raccolte Residui Sedimenti", curated by Maria Giovanna Mancini and Gianpaolo Cacciottolo, in which the plant archive was exhibited for the first time. It was not presented as a mere collection of traces of the past: it holds plant stories, human and interspecific relationships, and transforms over time, both as a result of external factors and through the interpretations that each individual gives it. Interpretations which, in turn, change as the years go by. On the very topic of multispecies relationships, Tiziana N. Beltrame and Luca Tonetti, whom I met recently, have published an article on the Society for Social Studies of Science’s website entitled "Being Hybrid: Galls as Multispecies Encounters". The paper also features the project "Parco Bibbiani 21.10.17_01.01_Andricus dentimitratus Project_2018". The authors regard galls as the visible result of a relationship between organisms, rather than the product of an encounter between two distinct entities: the plant and the parasite. Furthermore, some galls have a history linked to human activities: they contain tannins and have been used for centuries to produce ferrogallic ink.

The idea I was pursuing after my studies was still linked to a designed space, and took shape in enclosed spaces featuring slits along their perimeter. Visitors experienced this as an epiphany the moment they came into contact with the garden. Subsequently, my concept of a garden took on an environmental dimension: that well-designed and circumscribed space became a mechanism that reclaims areas of land affected by human activity, restoring them as open spaces where spontaneous processes can develop. In the future, what is planted or sown may not belong to the history of that place: climate change will force us to introduce species into our territories that belong to the history of distant places.

In 1987, Marisa Merz asked Francesca Pasini: ‘Does art exist when you create it or when you exhibit it?’. I believe that art conceived and directed by the artist exists when it is exhibited. I developed an artistic awareness in the classrooms at Brera when I was asked to present the work I was creating for the end-of-year exhibition at the Museo della Permanente, as part of the Salon 1 exhibition. It was June 1999. Unwittingly, however, I had started as a child: every spring I would create a garden with different plants and cultivate a passion for macro photography. With my aunt, I would develop black-and-white photographs in the darkroom and I also devoted myself to drawing, particularly geometric drawing. It is widely acknowledged, however, that individuals cannot control every aspect of life. If today I am an artist pursuing this kind of research, it is not down to me alone, but also to a series of factors that I found myself faced with without having chosen them, regardless of my day-to-day actions. I did not choose my family, the environment into which I was born, nor the artists and art historians who were available to me whilst I was studying at Brera.

Today, with very few exceptions, the function of art seems to be aimed exclusively at making money. It is a system currently facing many challenges. Many works, initially created in wood, paper or similar materials, change in scale when they enter the market and are reproduced multiple times in bronze, steel, marble and other more durable materials. They are often placed in green spaces or urban areas, and, particularly at this moment in history, may thus appear as ‘green’ works. But if a work is reproduced multiple times and on an ever-larger scale, does its conceptual value also increase? Or are we entering a form of ‘industrial art’ that leads to cultural desertification? The function of art should be to create culture and contribute to art history, not to line the pockets of those who organise commercial ventures, such as art fairs. For some time now, the public has been visiting the spaces for which the works are intended less and less, and flocking increasingly to art fairs; even institutions are acquiring works that are presented at art fairs, and we risk soon finding ourselves with museums that resemble exhibition stands.

If research is not financially supported, space is only given to works aimed at the market or to exhibitions designed to attract an audience. For several years now, the cultural value of an exhibition seems to have mattered less and less, with only the number of visitors it manages to attract counting. As early as 1816, Hegel expressed this concept: ‘An increase in quantity determines a change in the quality of the landscape’. When the focus is solely on profit, research is sidelined and ideas are effectively censored. The extreme outcome of this practice is not art with a political stance, grounded in intellectual awareness, but a ‘regime culture’. We use art – even ancient art – as if it were the fast food of contemporary culture. A shift in paradigm is necessary, placing specific subjectivities at the centre in order to foster a healthy ecology of art precisely through appropriate relationships.

This work stems from the need to explore, for the second time, the relationship between the plant kingdom and man-made architecture. The plaster casts of sections of the Victoria amazonica stem, recovered from the greenhouses at Villa Taranto in Verbania in 2003, become part of a garden situated within an architectural structure defined by the shape of its leaf.

forno-de-jaçanã, jaçanã, milho-d’água, nanpé and rainha-dos-lagos are some of the names that indigenous communities used to refer to the Victoria genus. The plant became known in the West thanks to the surveys carried out by European explorers in the early 19th century and was classified in 1837 by the British botanist John Lindley as Victoria regia, based on drawings sent by Robert Schomburgk during his 1836 expedition to South America. Subsequently, the official taxonomic name was changed to Victoria amazonica, as the previous name reflected the imposition and colonialist pressure exerted on native botanical species in non-European territories. 

This is an aquatic plant native to the Amazon basin, known to comprise three species: V. amazonica (formerly V. regia), V. cruziana and V. boliviana — the latter identified in 2022 and characterised by the largest leaves in the plant kingdom. 

The Amazonian Victoria is one of the most famous examples of interaction between the plant world and man-made architecture. On 13 November 1850, at the Society of Arts in London, the British architect Joseph Paxton identified the plant’s leaf as the ‘engineer’ behind the Crystal Palace, the enormous iron and glass structure erected in 1851 to host the first World’s Fair. The anatomy of the leaf inspired Paxton to use hollow tubular metal elements, capable of ensuring lightness and resistance to bending, particularly for the roof. It also inspired him to create a modular glass structure, designed to incorporate even the monumental trees already present within Hyde Park. The ‘greenhouse garden project_2011’ follows precisely this line of thought, taking the form of an architectural structure housing a garden based on the sections of the Victoria amazonica stem and, in some modules, on that of the lotus flower. The perimeter is composed of a series of vertical panels mounted on a metal framework that echoes the design of nineteenth-century Victorian-style greenhouses. 

The interior garden engages with the historical tradition of landscape design, evoking the rigorous layout of 16th-century formal gardens – with an explicit reference to Thomas Hill’s treatises – whilst in other instances it integrates directly into the paving design. The flowerbeds are formed by sections of the Victoria amazonica stem positioned throughout the space. In this way, the visitor enters the installation as if they were in a place capable of blending plant engineering, architecture and botanical anatomy. 

Before the summer of 2011, Valentina Grandini and Gino Pisapia took me to a location in the Tuscan countryside, specifically to Pieve a Presciano, where a residency programme founded by Elena El Asmar, Loris Cecchini and Luca Pancrazi had been established just a year earlier. It was there, during the second edition of the residency, that this work came into being. It was the first time I had used a living plant in a piece of work. It is a Howea forsteriana, commonly known as a Kentia palm, which, thanks to the extension of its leaves created by the silk threads, traces floor plans of classical architectural designs onto sheets of paper laid out on the floor. 

In other versions, it behaves as if it were a pantograph, because it projects the points it takes from the drawing laid out on the ground into the surrounding space, giving rise to columns that create a new architectural structure within the space. 

The Ceiba Garden Project _1896/2018 presents photographs taken with macro lenses of the thorns of ceiba trees in the Palermo Botanical Gardens. The work explores the relationship between the migration of plants—brought about by human exploration—the architecture that has developed around these species in their places of origin, and the relationships they have established in the places where they have adapted. In this instance, the thorns of Ceiba speciosa are juxtaposed with the circular-based Mexican pyramids and, in particular, with La Iguana, one of the main structures of the Guachimontones settlement. Its structure, formed by concentric circles leading to the altar at the summit, is linked to the numerology of the Mesoamerican agricultural calendar: the central level features thirteen steps in the first tier and four in the second. Thirteen multiplied by four equals fifty-two, which is the number of years in the Mesoamerican agricultural calendar.

This work stems from a collaboration with the astrophysicist Maria Teresa Crosta (INAF), following an invitation from the Merz Foundation to take part in the ‘Meteorite in Giardino’ programme curated by Maria Centonze and Willy Merz. The basic concept behind the first plate in the work is to associate an asterism with the title of the piece; its significance will be discussed in detail in the forthcoming publication edited by a researcher from the National Institute of Astrophysics and the artist.

In the second panel, the study of the work’s construction projects the painting’s main geometric shapes onto the screen-printed glass. The work is thus shown in its earliest stage of design, whilst the figures dissolve into geometric shapes.

In 1499, Aldo Manuzio anonymously published a work destined to become one of the most important in his publishing career: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, later attributed to Francesco Colonna. On page 20, in an illustration possibly by Benedetto Bordone, Polifilo is depicted sleeping beneath an oak tree, at the moment when the dream within a dream leads him through the wonders of a symbolic landscape. In this instance, the oak tree serves as a link between dreams, architecture and multispeciesism. In recent years, the oak has also become a subject of study due to the plant micro-architectures formed through its interactions with certain insects: galls. In 2024, the Botanical Museum of Padua hosted the exhibition "The Microcosm of Galls: The Alessandro Trotter Collection", dedicated to one of the most important collections of galls held by the museum.

In the exhibition catalogue, curators Tiziana N. Beltrame and Luca Tonetti introduce the theme by drawing on the account by biologist Laurent Tillon, Être un chêne: sous l’écorce de Quercus, published in 2021. Tillon tells the story of an oak tree around 240 years old, in the Rambouillet forest, and the network of relationships that binds it to the forest and to the beings that depend on it or interact with it: “This also includes galls: typical plant growths produced by a gall wasp, Neuroterus quercusbaccarum. Once it has identified a suitable shoot, the wasp lays its eggs in the plant’s tender tissues, which, in response, form a sort of protective shell around the larvae. Tillon imagines that, in some way, the oak is completely unaware of what is happening to it. And yet, the relationship between the larva, the gall and the host plant seems perfectly orchestrated: Quercus ends up working for the larva, providing it with protection and nourishment – everything necessary for its growth.

adobe garden project _2020 is a permanent installation specifically designed for the green space at the PAV Parco Arte Vivente in Turin, a venue created to serve both as an exhibition space and a public park. It consists of container-like structures designed to attract pollinating insects. The sculptures, composed of ceramic modules, stand approximately 2.5 metres tall, and their shapes draw inspiration from the geometric forms of certain plant species. The upper section has been treated with coloured engobes to attract insects. The project also pursues educational objectives, which will be developed through initiatives organised by the PAV’s Educational and Training Activities department, dedicated to the protection of biodiversity. The ‘adobe garden project_2020’ is the winner of the PAC2020 – Plan for Contemporary Art public call for proposals, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. 

When we began to select certain living species and, with the advent of agriculture, to rear and cultivate them in captivity, a form of classification began which, from the mid-18th century, took on the universal form we still recognise today. The creation of labels to classify species and of vast archives has, once again, given rise to exclusive, single-species environments. The city arises from the garden, and not the other way round! The garden must not be thought of as an interruption to the city!

Does eating a piece of fruit mean coming into contact, through language, with a plant or with agriculture? It is through the language that touches the fruit that we have given the garden a name. But what is a garden? Can it be named? And what happens the moment the garden is named? It becomes ‘Italian-style’, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and so on. But can we call all these forms ‘gardens’? Who decided how to describe a garden? Who first marked out a boundary to assert that that area belonged to private property? And who believed them? Whose land is it? The garden is therefore a cultural construct: a generally enclosed and man-made space, far removed from the notion of a range or habitat, where the living world is inclusive and multi-species. The garden can exist only within that very fine line that is the biosphere. But for how much longer will the balance between temperature and humidity allow us to preserve a certain form of ‘planetary garden’?

Marcello Ghilardi’s lecture formed the basis of the residency I undertook in Xiamen at the Paper Times Library during July and August 2025, curated by Numero 51, Julia Julia Rönnqvist Buzzetti and Lucy Lin. The exhibition unfolded across two twin, adjacent spaces: the first was a space that could only be observed from the outside and is conceived as a total habitat within which the ‘writing’ created by the relationships between insects and the plant kingdom manifests itself in various ways. The second space contained six large prints of dandelion leaves, collected from the garden of the Parco Arte Vivente in Turin, with particular emphasis placed on the patterns created by the green serpentine. Visitors had the opportunity to read the books placed within the niches – all selected in keeping with the garden’s theme – and to explore, through these works, the relationship between the plant kingdom and the insect kingdom. 

Xylella fastidiosa is a plant-pathogenic bacterium, first identified in olive trees in the Salento region in October 2013. Some studies suggest that it may have arrived in Italy as early as 2008; the first instances of dieback observed in the Salento region are thought to date back to 2010. The bacterium is associated with rapid olive wilt syndrome and is transmitted by insect vectors such as the spittlebug (Philaenus spumarius). In 2023, Coldiretti estimated that over 21 million olive trees had been affected in Puglia. The epidemic has profoundly transformed the Salento landscape, leaving extensive olive-growing areas with trees that have withered or been felled. The crisis is taking place in a region characterised by intensive agricultural practices. 

The entire space is conceived as a habitat that transports the viewer into a countryside infested with the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium, a landscape that has lost all memory and biodiversity linked to the local environment and the culture that had developed around those trees. 

On the walls, two large photographs of areas in Salento show piles of shredded trees and an uprooted tree; these vast quantities of biomass are removed from the land to be burnt in power station incinerators. The two large images are fragmented across A4 sheets and drawn with very soft pencils. The sculptures in the space feature frottages of centuries-old trees which no longer bear the concentric rings of the trunk, but rather the marks left by the saw that cut them down; resting on the bases of the sculptures are several trunks collected from olive groves that were deliberately set alight. 

This scenario illustrates how land used for monoculture farming can be vulnerable when attacked by an ‘external’ agent.

Ever since my days at art school, I have been collecting botanical remnants during my travels, research and walks around the city. In December 2025, part of this archive was displayed in the exhibition "In-ectum. Collections, Remnants, Sediments" at the Spazio Murat in Bari. The exhibition was curated by Maria Giovanna Mancini, a lecturer at the University of Bari and author of the recent "Fare paesaggio in Puglia," and Gianpaolo Cacciottolo. The archive is not merely a collection of traces from the past: it preserves stories of plants, as well as human and interspecific relationships, and transforms over time, both due to external factors and through the different interpretations that each person gives it, which in turn change as the years go by.

The exhibition also featured sculptures made from pressed grapes, sourced from the harvests of a number of farmers who, in a few years’ time, may no longer be carrying out this work. These works refer to the history of agricultural practices and techniques, spanning the last ten thousand years. The final presentation of the exhibition was the result of a workshop held as part of the ‘Paesaggi Espansi’ project, in which the following took part: Oronzo Blonda, Annalisa Ciliberti, Luigi Di Bitonto, Giacoma Di Vieste, Ilenia Mariarosaria Esposito, Giovanna Fiore, Federica Giangaspero, Sara Lauriola, Sara Maffia, Gaia Martinelli, Diego Osimo and Rossana Pagliaro.